As
we approach the 65th
annoversary of the nazi invasion of the Soviet Union and as NATO
masses its troops on the Russian border for the first time since
June, 1941 these reflections are very apt.

Deconstructing
Russophobia

Imagine
that Vladimir Putin were not a murderous autocrat and kleptocrat who
has spent his fourteen years in power living up to his KGB past and
dragging Russia ever back towards Communist autocracy, illiberalism,
and expansionism. Imagine that instead he were one of the greatest
leaders that Russia has had, whose policies have helped produce a
massive rise in living standards and life expectancy, recuperation of
national pride, and enforcement of the rule of law, who has tackled
kleptocrats and gangsters wisely and well, whose foreign policy has
on balance been realistic, diplomatic, and conducive to peace, who
has presided over a country of which the human rights record is
considerably better than that of the United States and in which civil
rights are improving, and who richly deserves the steady support of
65% – currently at a Ukraine-related high of 83% – of the
population that he possesses. It is my understanding that the reality
is closer to the second scenario than the first – and I may note
that I say this as someone with no ethnic, financial, professional or
political ties to Russia whatsoever. It follows that I am not a
Russian expert – but nor am I, on the other hand, parti pris. I am
a friendly, distanced observer of the country.

Let
me start by explaining the history of my connection to the country.
When I was a teenager my somewhat timid and unimaginative school
uncharacteristically decided to organise a trip to a wacky place such
as Russia, where, as it seemed, considerable political change
happened to be taking place. So it was that I visited the Soviet
Union during the last month of its existence, whilst myself having
almost as little conception of what the Soviet Union was, as of what
might be about to replace it. Some years later, in my year, so-called
‘out’, before university, I found myself living on the Danube’s
South bank in Ruse, Bulgaria, learning some Bulgarian but telling
myself that if ever I properly learned a Slavic language it would be
one that would allow me to converse with hundreds of millions not
just seven million users. After a degree in English I made a diagonal
move into an MSc in Russian and Post-Soviet Studies at the London
School of Economics, where it was abundantly clear that Britain’s
finest kremlinogists had had very little idea that or when the Soviet
Union was going to end – and who, tsarist nostalgists and Soviet
nostalgists alike – were dismayed at what was happening in the
country at the time. The worst time was already over when, in 2002, I
moved to Moscow to improve my book-learned Russian, and to teach
English. I became amongst other things an Anglo-Russian literary
comparatist, and have visited the country at least annually since
then.

The
Moscow I remember of 1991 was febrile, almost but not quite panicked,
and throngingly poor. The Moscow I remember of 2002 can best be
summarised with the word ‘rough’. Though safe in ways in which
London isn’t – I often used private cars as taxis, alone, at
night – there were also several obvious ways to die which London
lacked. Open manhole covers, slipping drunk in the snow, crossfire.
This was ‘diky capitalism’ – wild capitalism, with its gloves
decidedly off. Legless – literally – Afghan vets pushing
themselves through the snow, their torsos balanced on makeshift
skateboards. Families camped out singing for their supper.
Concert-quality violinists busking. Professional gymnasts stripping
in nightclubs. Makeup stores where Western brands were sold at what I
at first thought were ruble prices but were in fact hugely inflated
and illegal US dollar prices. My employer at a private English school
wasn’t paying tax, on the grounds that he couldn’t both do that
and be solvent. Police one crossed the street to avoid – both
because one’s own affairs would inevitably involve some illegality,
and because they were underpaid and relied on bribes.

A
year later, on a visit, the situation was slightly better. The most
extravagant misery was no longer apparent. A year later, better
still. And that has been the consistent pattern on all my visits
since then. Capitalism has been getting its gloves back on. Public
facilities are in a much better state. Nothing is sold in dollars and
Western brands have Russian rivals. A sensible tax structure means
that businesses and salaried employees can and do pay their taxes.
One sees no-one drunk in public. Muscovite women no longer exaggerate
their femininity in a way which testifies to financial insecurity and
a strenuous imitation of a pornographically-imagined West. And most
reassuringly of all, to Westerners used to this custom, people have
begun to smile. Even the hardest cases – the babushki guarding the
museum rooms, and the border guards at passport control – will now
return a smile. Last year, for the first time, I felt that Russia was
in a new phase – the post-post-Soviet, in which people are no
longer waiting for normality to be re-established, or yearning to
live in a ‘normal’ country. A new normality, and a new optimism,
have emerged.

My
locus of pulse-taking of the country has usually been Moscow – to a
lesser extent St Petersburg, Nizhnii Novgorod, and Perm – but from
what I hear of the rest of the country, the improvement has been, if
slower, widespread and also steady.

Now
this period of my acquaintance has coincided with Putin’s time in
power. It is one feature of the Western media treatments of Russia
that it makes Putin metonymic of the country, one of its assumptions
being his increasingly autocratic control of it. I dispute that
assumption; but I have no doubt that Putin has had a decisive impact
on Russian politics in this century. For this reason, my target in
this post is not only Russophobia but Putinophobia, and I consider
these to be related biases: here I am taking a phobia in the sense of
a negative prejudice.

The
impetus for this post is my sense that the Russia which I have got to
know, and the Russia I see described in Western and specifically
British mainstream media, have become increasingly discrepant. As
Russia, in my experience, has improved with regard to just about
every indicator I can think of, its image in the Western press has
deteriorated. Now, there are all kinds of ways in which improving
living standards could be compatible with increasing autocracy and
international belligerence – one thinks of Hitler. But I believe
that no such combination pertains in Putin’s case.

I
will just finish this introduction with an anecdote. This April I
visited the British Council in Moscow and spoke to two of its young
Russian employees. One expects such people to be broadly
Western-orientated and Anglophile. Part of their job was to analyse
British press coverage of Russia, and, for as long as they were under
the mistaken impression that I was a BBC journalist, they were
guarded to the point of hostility. When I clarified my position as an
academic, and a sceptic of British coverage of Russia, they burst
into smiles, and shared with me how depressed reading and watching
this coverage makes them. I know no Russian who has any knowledge of
Russia’s representation in Britain who is not strongly critical of
it. I too am depressed by it, specifically because I think that it is
intellectually and morally demeaning, and counter-productive to a
dangerous degree.

In
the rest of this post I’m not going to simply contrast mainstream
British and American media assertions with my own. What I will try to
do is describe a few of the ways in which what I consider to be a
false image is constructed, and the factors favouring the survival of
this image – in the hope that if my description of those processes
rings true, then it may influence your responses to the media’s
representations henceforth. Finally, I will consider the practical
effects of the media’s image of Russia.

The
means of its creation are the usual suspects in cases of bias:
distortion of fact through exaggeration, understatement, and
fabrication; false inferences; inconsistent application of standards;
and misuse of language.

To
start with exaggeration: the argument that Putin has overwhelming
control of the Russian media is often highly overstated. Much TV is
state-owned, but some of the state-owned channels, such as RIA
Novosti, criticise Putin, as do many radio stations and newspapers.
Putin gets far more criticism in the Russian press as a whole than
does Cameron in the British press. Now this isn’t comparing like
for like, since there might in theory be more grounds for criticising
Putin – but it is nonetheless a fact, which conflicts with part of
the image of Russia as frequently presented. The internet is freer
than it is in Britain – one reason why online intellectual piracy
is rife – and many Russians get their news from the internet.
Government control of the media therefore cannot convincingly be
adduced as a significant reason for Putin’s consistently high
popularity ratings.

Protests
against him, on the other hand, receive coverage far out of
proportion to their size – even as overestimated, despite the fact
that large, peaceful protests indicate the right to protest. The
demonstrations in Moscow after the March 2012 presidential election
are a case in point. Coverage of such protests also involved
understatement of their most important political component – the
Communists. Support for the Communist Party is running at a steady
20%, making it by far the most important opposition party. The
British media, however, focuses overwhelmingly on the ‘liberal’
opposition. It is understandable that it does this given that that is
the tendency which it supports, but it also gives a false impression
that the ‘liberal’ opposition is in fact at present the main one.
Footage of the demonstrations in which the Communist flag
predominated undermined the British commentary which was voiced over
it.

This
exaggeration of size and importance both of the protests and of the
liberal component in them, is clearly the product of wishful thinking
– but if one is really interested in seeing the replacement of
Putin by a liberal, it does one no favours to overstate the current
importance of the liberal opposition even to oneself. One should
instead confront the fact that the liberal parties combined poll
around only 5% of the vote, and should then try to work out what is
wrong with these parties’ message and or leaders, and/or what is
wrong with the voters’ ability to perceive the attractiveness of
their message.

But
the most important elision in coverage of Russia is of those
improvements in demographic indicators, living standards, national
affluence, and the rule of law, which I mentioned. During his first
twelve years in power GDP increased by some 850%. The country is now
largely debtless, with a large reserve of currency reserves. Due to
Putin’s policies revenues from oil now serve the national economy.
Mortality has sharply declined, and the birth rate increased.

Then
there is fabrication, or speculation presented as fact.

A
good example of this is Putin’s personal wealth – which has
received some fantastically high estimates in Forbes and Bloomberg,
including that he is the ninth richest man in the world, or indeed
the richest man. These theories took much of their impetus from
claims by two men, analyst Stanislav Belkovsky, cousin of Berezovsky,
and liberal politician Boris Nemtsov. The allegations are that he
secretly owns a large part or all of Gazprom and related energy
companies such as Gunvor. Indeed, when The Economist published
allegations about Putin’s ownership of Gunvor in 2008 it was sued
and forced to print a retraction. There are probably only a very few
people in the world who actually know the size and precise form of
Putin’s wealth: he himself, and one or two others. I would only
observe, first, that specific allegations have not been proved;
second, that speculations should not be presented as confirmed fact;
and third, that nothing which is known about Putin’s history and
proud, workaholic character suggests someone to whom the things that
money can buy have a strong appeal; a sybaritic Goering he is not.

Other
claims made about corruption in Russia are self-evidently absurd.
Certain claims made about corruption at the Sochi Olympics would, if
true, mean that more money had been lost to corruption than the
entire GDP of the country.

The
credulity leant to the claims made by critics of Putin by virtue of
being made by Putin’s critics leads me onto one false inductive
inference found commonly in coverage of Putin: that my enemy’s
enemy is my friend. When combined with the assumption that there is
governmental interference in the operation of the law in Russia, this
has the outcome that when somebody who is accused of a crime in
Russia voices criticism of Putin they effectually enlist on their
side in protestation of their innocence a preponderance of the
British media.

That
is, not only is my enemy’s enemy my friend, and not only is Putin’s
critic therefore my friend, but Putin’s critic is innocent – not
only negatively innocent of any crime as charged, but positively
innocent and good, because by virtue of opposing a tyrant they are
dissident, and therefore of the same genre of person as the saintly
Solzhenitsyn or Sakharov. In actual fact, a prisoner with political
views is not the same as a political prisoner.

It
is true that the Russian legal system is less fair than the British,
and lacks several of its important features in both criminal and
civil law – for example the principle of disclosure of adverse
evidence. The system is young, having been created for the new
capitalist system at the end of Communism. Many of the lawyers and
judges are therefore still relatively young and inexperienced, and
adhere rather too closely to the letter of the law. Defence is still
not as well established a profession as prosecution, and this shows.
These factors affect the justice of all trials in the country.

But
two things must immediately be added to this. First, that the
situation is getting gradually better. Putin did not destroy the
independence of the judiciary; before him it scarcely existed, and is
being gradually built up. Second, the allegation that all trials of
Putin’s critics are unjust by the standards of the system as it
exists has very little evidence to support it.

In
the 1990s much of Russia’s wealth corruptly and often violently
became the private property of a few so-called oligarchs. When Putin
became President he made them an offer that constituted quite
possibly the optimum intersection of pragmatism, forward-thinking,
and justice. They could either pay back some of their unpaid tax,
invest some of their wealth in their home regions, and refrain from
leveraging their wealth into political power – or be prosecuted for
their past crimes as committed. Some, like Abramovich, accepted the
compromise offered, and have flourished. Others, like Khodorkovsky,
didn’t. His trial for tax evasion was widely criticised in the West
as politically motivated and unfair. What has scarcely been reported
is that on 25th July 2013 the European Court of Human Rights (to
which Russia as a member of the Council of Europe is subject) found
that the trial was not politically motivated, that Khodorkovsky was
guilty as charged, and that he was appropriately sentenced (although
it found certain procedural irregularities in his treatment, for
which it ordered compensation to be paid). In other cases, such as
those of Pussy Riot and would-be presidential candidate Aleksei
Navalny (whose appeals to the European Court of Human Rights have yet
to be heard), the defendants were found guilty of crimes under
Russian law on the basis of strong evidence, and were given sentences
which not only fitted well within the range of sentences available
for the crime concerned, but which resembled sentences which the same
crimes would have received were they committed in Britain. In
Britain, Pussy Riot would have been charged under the Public Order
Act 1986, for offences under which the maximum sentence is two years
in prison (which is what Pussy Riot received). Navalny would have
been charged under the Theft Act 1968, for offences under which the
maximum sentence is six years (Navalny received five). In certain
respects the operation of the Russian law is more lenient than the
British. Prior to their ‘punk prayer’ in the Cathedral of Christ
the Saviour, members of Pussy Riot had performed public sex in a
museum, and thrown live cats at workers in a McDonalds restaurant. In
Britain such acts could have resulted in prison sentences of at least
two years, whereas in Russia they were not prosecuted at all. One
reason why Pussy Riot were prosecuted for their ‘punk prayer’ was
that it disrupted and parodied a religious act of worship, which is
specifically prohibited under Russian (as also British) law, and
which is particularly comprehensible in a country with a history of
state persecution of religion.

Finally,
criticism of the conviction on well-founded criminal charges of those
who have opposed Putin amounts to a demand that anyone who has
opposed Putin should be above the law simply by that virtue. It
should rather be argued that Putin’s closest allies (such as the
former defence minister Serdyukov, whose trial for fraud has been
much delayed), if suspected of criminal activities, should not be
above the law. To do the inverse is to argue that the rule of law in
Russia be undermined. Indeed, it is implicitly to argue that Putin
should prevent the law taking its course in the case of anyone who
criticises him, which is the same as calling for political
interference in the law, which is precisely what is ostensibly being
criticised. If the point is made that not all oligarchs have been
treated equally, the proper response is to demand that they all be
held accountable for their crimes, not none of them.

It
is worth adding that supporting anyone, no matter how criminally
malodorous, provided that they publically oppose Putin, turns us into
their useful idiots, and makes us appear idiotic to many Russians who
cannot understand on what basis other than political enmity such a
person as Boris Berezovsky was given asylum in Britain rather than
being extradited to stand trial for crimes in Russia.

Internationally,
something of the same dynamic of support for an enemy’s enemy is
apparent. NATO is hostile to Russia, therefore, for some, there is a
reason to support NATO. But on what bases do NATO and Russia
disagree? First, Russia weakly or strongly opposed NATO’s
interventions in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya. Which was
right depends on your attitude towards those interventions, but if
one desires peace rather than war – civil or otherwise – then
Russia rather than NATO should be judged to have acted better.

Second,
NATO has behaved with much greater hostility towards Russia than
Russia towards it. In 1990 both the EU and NATO promised Russia they
would not expand Eastwards. Since then they have done that
relentlessly. Russia has done almost nothing in response. It did,
however, protest loudly and understandably against the planned
deployment of US ballistic missile interceptors in Poland and
Romania. The US would certainly not tolerate Russia basing similar
systems in Cuba or Venezuela.

This
brings us on to inconsistent application of standards. The Russian
government is almost invariably interpreted in the worst possible
light by being held to higher standards than other countries.

Let’s
take the recent controversial ‘gay law’. Such positive aspect as
the Russian government uncharacteristically and briefly enjoyed in
the eyes of Edward Snowden’s supporters when he was granted asylum
in Russia was quickly lost in the US-centred campaign against the gay
law which began immediately afterwards. The law making it an
‘administrative offence’ [minor crime] to present homosexuality
in a positive light to minors is a bad law, because it makes a minor
offence out of something which was scarcely practised and which
should not be banned. It explicitly outlaws ‘homosexual paedophile
propaganda’ whilst making no mention of ‘heterosexual paedophile
propaganda’. However, in Russia private and public homosexuality is
as legal as heterosexuality – yet there was negligible support for
a boycott on for example Qatar, scheduled to hold the World Cup,
which has vastly more repressive anti-gay legislation. Furthermore
several US states have anti-gay legislation much stronger than what
exists in Russia, but nobody has proposed any kind of boycott of
America on this basis. Pro-gay American barmen did not pour Scotch
whiskey down the drains between 1988 and 2003 to protest against the
very similar law (Section 28 of the Local Government Act) which was
then in place in Britain. It seems clear that the anti-Russian gay
law campaign flourished because of Russophobia – the phenomenon I
am describing. You may remember during the coverage of the Sochi
Olympics there was Claire Balding being genially responsive to the
impressive facilities and the warm support of the local Russians,
standing alongside BBC Russian correspondent Daniel Sandford, who
would repeatedly interject – rather in the manner of a Soviet
commissar – comments such as: ‘ah, but we must never forget that
this is the country where the presentation of homosexuality to minors
in a positive light is an administrative offence’.

I
am not saying that any amount of impressive facilities and warm
locals should whitewash egregious human rights violations – but the
Russian gay law simply isn’t that. Russia’s leading gay activist,
Nikolai Alexeyev, became increasingly distressed at the way in which
the US-based anti-gay-law campaign was being used as a tool of
Russophobia. On the 17th August 2013 he tweeted: ‘All Western media
want to hear from me that Russia is shit and I don’t want to take
part in this hypocrisy. So all interviews are over!’ For this
reaction, he, a brave campaigner against the gay law, was unfairly
branded a stooge of Putin – and so a divide opened up between
Russophobic pro-gay activists and Russian gay activists, whose job it
is to actually change opinions on the ground.

And
as with gay rights, so with human rights in general. Russia gets held
to higher standards not only than countries such as Bahrain and
China, but the United States. On the basis of Western media coverage
one would think that Russia’s human rights situation was worse than
that of the States, and at least as bad as that of China – both of
which notions are preposterous.

Let
us compare Russia to the United States (China being of course much
worse than both). The US has around 730 to Russia’s 598 prisoners
per 100,000 of the population. It uses the death penalty, executes
minors, and empowers its President to authorise the kidnap, torture,
and killing of domestic and foreign citizens without trial. Russia
does none of these things. The US government has significantly
curtailed Americans’ civil liberties under the Patriot Act,
extensively spies on the media activities of its own and other
countries’ citizens, and detains hundreds of people without trial
in an international network of secret prisons. Russians’ civil
liberates are now more strongly guaranteed by law than are
Americans’; there is no evidence or suggestion that Russia kidnaps
individuals abroad or outsources torture, nor that it runs a torture
camp resembling Guantanamo Bay, nor that the FSB spies on Russian
citizens to anything near the extent that the NSA spies on Americans,
let alone on foreigners. In this respect – the extent of spying on
their own citizens – Russia and the US have changed places since
the end of the Soviet Union. Whereas the trend of US law over the
last decade and a half has been to diminish civil liberties, in
Russia the legal culture is becoming gradually more humane and
liberal. Russia puts suspected Islamic terrorists whom it has
captured on trial within a reasonable period, and does not deny them
habeas corpus. America’s popular culture (including films such as
Zero Dark Thirty) acknowledges that America has practised torture,
and suggests that it may have been justified in doing so. Russia’s
popular culture does not endorse the practice of torture. The
contrast between Western treatments of Russia and of the US with
regard to human rights was apparent when in 2012 Amnesty
International ran a Priority Action campaign on behalf of Pussy Riot,
whose members it had designated prisoners of conscience, whilst not
running such a campaign on behalf of Bradley – now Chelsea –
Manning, whom it had not (and has not) designated a prisoner of
conscience. The members of Pussy Riot had been sentenced, as I
mentioned, to two years in prison, according to the law, for a crime
which they had committed. At the time, Bradley Manning was being
subjected to cruel, inhuman, and degrading punishment, prior to being
tried for any crime. This gave an unfortunate appearance of political
partiality to Amnesty’s decisions, implying that they considered
the relatively humane and legal treatment of critics of Putin to be a
more urgent and flagrant violation of human rights than the torture
before trial of a whistleblower on American torture.

On
the issue of double standards let us consider too the advice which
America gives to Russia. During the protests on Maidan Square in Kiev
you may remember John Kerry urging Yanukovich to demonstrate
‘restraint’ with regard to the protesters. He showed so much
restraint that he left the city rather than ordering his police to
defend his Presidency by force, as they would have been capable of
doing. Can you imagine any American President being induced to flee
by violent street protests in Washington? In Washington the Maidan
protests wouldn’t have lasted a couple of days. If you draw a
lethal weapon in the presence of a police officer you may legally be
shot dead. In Kiev, around 20 policemen were killed. One can imagine
the scornful and outraged response were Putin, for example, to urge
that Obama show restraint in the face of violent protests, to the
extent of allowing himself to be overthrown.

It
goes without saying that the dictators with whom Russia has
relatively good relations, in Syria, North Korea, and Cuba, are
excoriated in a way in which not only does the West not excoriate the
dictators in Saudia Arabia, Bahrain, Quatar, Uzbekistan, Honduras,
Thailand, and Egypt – but a way in which Russia doesn’t excoriate
them either. Overall not only does the West not practice what it
preaches to Russia, it preaches where Russia does not – and
although I have no general objection to preaching – I’m a
Lawrencian for goodness sake – I do object to the preaching of
hypocrites.

One
thing that assists in our inconsistent application of standards is
our use of language. Protesters on Maidan were protesters; in
Slaviansk, Kramatorsk, Mariupol they were rebels. Putin’s
government is frequently referred to as a regime, and therefore
likened to a dictatorship, whereas not only does Russia, like the US,
have an imperfect democracy, but Putin personally has a twenty
percent higher approval rating than does Obama, and at least
twenty-five percent higher than Cameron. But there is one word in
particular which is misused in a Russian context – ‘liberal’.
Now, this is a notoriously protean word, but there does seem to be
agreement over its denotation in a Russian context, where it
generally assumed to mean ‘promoting Western values with regard to
individual liberty, equality, democracy and the rule of law’.
However, when one considers the policies of those politicians and
commentators described as liberal, one finds that what is in fact
denoted is ‘promoting foreign and economic policies which are
aligned with Western interests, whatever other (possibly illiberal)
views are held’. For example, Aleksei Navalny, who was frequently
described as a liberal opposition leader, holds views which most
Western liberals would categorise as racist. Since most Russians do
not want Russia to conform to NATO geopolitical or economic interests
at its own expense, and since Western capitalism is damaged by
association with the nineteen-nineties (a period which has never
sufficiently been accepted in the West as having been a catastrophe),
so-called ‘liberals’ account for a relatively small proportion of
the popular vote. Yet Russophobic narrative conflates ‘liberal’
with ‘democratic’. The fact that Putin’s policies have vastly
more appeal than so-called liberal ones does not make Putin an
anti-democrat, and those who oppose the democratically elected Putin
are not ‘pro-democratic’ by that virtue.

Russophobia,
like Said’s account of Orientalism, therefore relies on and
generates contradictions. On the one hand it constructs an enemy
which is aggressive and to be feared, threatening its neighbours such
as the Ukraine and Georgia. On the other hand it creates a risible
enemy of which the economy is flimsily dependent on oil – a point
far less often made about far more strongly oil-reliant allies such
as Saudi Arabia.

Both
Russia’s aggression and its weakness are overstated – that is,
the desire (for reasons I’ll come on to) to construct an enemy
produces an image (and to a small extent, a reality) which is then
actually feared, the power of which needs to be understated. Since
1989, when it withdrew from Afghanistan, it has sent its troops only
into Georgia, and that in support of the inhabitants of a
semi-autonomous enclave which Georgian troops had entered in
violation of international treaties. In fact it threatens no one.

But
the understatement of its power is just as striking. Speaking to
businessmen working in Russia – Russian and foreign alike – it
became clear to me that Russia is hugely and diversely economically
productive, avoiding many of the pitfalls of indebtedness and a phony
banking system which afflict our own economy. L’Oréal, Danône,
Peugeot, and Renault are all making huge profits in Russia. Far from
being entirely reliant on the export of oil, Russia makes a range of
manufactured goods including steel, chemicals, pharmaceuticals,
clothing, ship building, machine tools, aircraft, food processing,
furniture, computers, tractors, optical devices, commercial vehicles,
and mobile phones. It has a big construction industry, and in fields
such as nuclear power engineering and space technology it is one of
the world’s leaders. These are perhaps little thought of in the
West perhaps because they tend to be heavy goods, not consumer goods,
and are therefore not found in Western shops. Income tax is flat at
13%, in a way which at present encourages economic growth (though is,
I assume, a temporary measure, before a more socialist graduated
income tax one day replaces it). There is around 10% interest on
current accounts. The sanctions have hurt, but have also led to more
inward investment. And the narrative of Russian weakness is also
assisted by ignoring its relations with the rest of the world beyond
the West. There are strengthening Russian-Chinese ties, and warm
relations between Russia and most countries of Asia, Africa, and
South America – including both China and Japan, both India and
Pakistan, both Israel and Palestine.

When
I attended a meeting of businessmen discussing responses to the
sanctions in Moscow in April it was telling that the Ambassadors who
decided to come – at least, those that I met – were from South
Africa, Mexico, Peru, Benin, Indonesia and Malaysia. Not one from the
‘West’, and that is really a metaphor for the fact that the West
does not witness, and does not want to see, the good relations which
Russia has with the rest of the world.

But
there are many factors which favour the construction and persistence
of Russophobia.

One
of the first and most obvious is limited contact with the country
itself. From the sixteenth century, when West Europeans started
travelling to Russia in any numbers, it’s been rightly observed
that Russia is difficult to get to, travel in, and onerous in its
passport requirements. Tit-for-tat visa policy means that it is not
easy to pop to St Petersburg for a quick city break – indeed, there
are very few direct flights between London, the world’s
air-transport hub, and the second biggest city of the world’s
biggest country – which, thinking of some of the other places you
can get more frequent direct flights to from London, is
extraordinary. Limited contact with Russia, and limited learning of
its language, mean limited ability to test the validity of the
media’s image of Russia. That image is itself partly the
construction of journalists who themselves know very little about the
country, and who echo each other. But it also the construction of
local foreign correspondents such as The Guardian’s Luke Harding
and The Economist’s Ed Lucas, who in my opinion fall into that
category of people who can live in a country whilst loathing and
misrepresenting it, just as people can live in a country, love it,
and misrepresent it in a positive direction.

One
feature favouring the re-echoing of opinions between journalists
resident and otherwise is the obverse of a phenomenon I have
discovered amongst people who disagree with them. In Moscow friends
of mine who approve of Putin include Russians, Americans, a Finn,
and a Frenchman. They work in Russia as journalists, businessmen and
lawyers. Their political views range from Conservative to
nearly-Communist to green. But they have all, along their different
paths and from their own perspectives, come to admire Putin, whose
politics can’t easily be described in terms of traditional
left-right analysis. The obverse of this is that he can be criticised
from all perspectives, so what we have is a rare unity in British
Russophobia between left wing and right wing media outlets, and
indeed broadsheet and tabloid newspapers.

Another
feature favouring Russophobia is that its image of Russia chimes with
much older images that Russia has had in the West – chiefly, as
autocratic. The main period of contact between West Europe and Russia
has been characterised by increasing disparity between levels of
democracy in the West and the East; this remained true until
relatively recently. Assertions that Putin is autocratic fit into a
primordialist narrative about Russia as unfitted to democracy: there
are just two problems. One, primordialism is now largely as
discredited in political science as is racism, and for similar
reasons (pace the success of Martin Sixsmith’s 2011 Russia: A
Thousand Years of the Wild East). Second, Putin isn’t autocratic.
The narrative of reversion to autocracy after the relatively
democratic Yeltsin years is particularly absurd given that in 1993
Yeltsin closed down news outlets and sent tanks to the White House to
disperse the Russian Parliament, which was opposing his deeply
unpopular economic policies. Over the following few days it’s
estimated that between 187 and 2000 people were killed. Putin has
never done anything remotely similar, and it is of course possible to
misinterpret someone whose policies are widely supported – inside
of and beyond parliament – as a dictator who brooks no opposition.

It
has to be said, though, that Russia itself has been a major home of
primordialist thought, mainly about itself. What is the idea of the
russkaia dusha, or Russian soul, but an argument that Russia is a)
distinctive and b) unchanging, in its essence? The discourse of the
Russian soul is complicated (please find my article about it here),
but part of it fits with the idea that the Russian people are
subservient and long-suffering. And this idea gets a lot of
reinforcement from Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. However, it was not the
only primordialist account in town. Eurasianism competed with
Slavophilism, and both with Westernism – Westernisers arguing, of
course, that Russia could and should catch up with the West.
Nonetheless, Russia of all countries has, in its literature and
philosophy, given considerable encouragement to primordialist thought
about itself.

I
mentioned the homology of primordialism to racism – and I would
argue that there is a racial dimension to Russophobia or what I might
alternatively have called Russism. Here again it operates through
contradiction. On the one hand Russians are othered as favouring
autocracy and subservience. On the other hand they are expected to
behave just like Western Europeans despite their vastly different
historical circumstances, and I am sure that one reason for this is
that European Russians look almost exactly like West Europeans, which
the Chinese or the Turks, for example, don’t. In proportion as
there is little difference of melanin pigmentation, eye colour, and
facial structure, little difference of political behaviour is
tolerated – and where it occurs, is then by reaction essentialised.

Putin
himself has been very successfully demonised. His KGB past is
frequently invoked in a way which overlooks the fact that the KGB was
a standard career option for ambitious young Soviets when he was
choosing his career. I might mention the fact that he cites Maxim
Isayev as an influence on his desire to join the KGB. Isayev is the
hero of the 1972 cult Soviet miniseries Seventeen Moments of Spring –
the Soviet answer to James Bond. Isayev is a Russian agent pretending
to be an Obergruppenführer in Berlin at the end of the Second World
War. He is brave, cultured, intelligent, merciful, and of complete
integrity – a Soviet hero, protecting Russia from Germany and
Germany from itself, of a kind that young men such as Putin aspired
to become. Of course as we know, spying is not as it is in the films.
But in our post-Snowden-revelations era, it is most odd to continue
to deplore someone for having spied on the citizens of another
country, and to repeatedly use this as a lens of negative
interpretation of all of their subsequent actions.

In
his self-presentation as a macho man Putin does himself no favours in
the West. But I think that Russians need pay no more attention to our
generalised scorn for this image than the British need pay to
Americans, whose generalised impression it is that all British men
are gay. The reason is that normal male behaviour here is in various
ways softer, and less literally and metaphorically muscular, than is
the norm in North America. In Russia Putin’s performance of
masculinity is far more acceptable than it is here – and all the
more so in contrast to the series of gerontocrats who ruled the
Soviet Union after Stalin, and the embarrassingly hard-drinking
Yeltsin. It should also be noted that it is not only for his macho
personal qualities that he is admired; he is also admired as
clean-living, in contrast to Yeltsin and many of the country’s men
during Yeltsin’s period in power, and as highly educated –
speaking Russian without grammatical errors, again in contrast to
Yeltsin.

But
his self-projection is emphatically directed at the Russian people,
rather than the rest of the world, and this fits with the fact that
Putin does not try to woo the West – he plays them (to adopt an
English metaphor) with an entirely straight bat. Something of a
Communist contempt for advertising is apparent in his lack of
interest in spin for either himself or his country, when it comes to
the West. This was one reason why Georgia got the best of the
coverage of the Georgia-Russia conflict, in a way which even Martin
Sixsmith admits was biased on the part of the BBC. Columbia-educated
Saakashvili was willing and able to do PR in a way in which Medvedev
wasn’t. A different contrast to Russia here is provided by China,
which responds very sharply, and indeed aggressively, to public
criticism, and which if anything is a beneficiary of the opprobrium
heaped on Russia, since it takes attention away from itself, the far
more credible threat to Western interests. Russia, on the other hand,
does next to nothing to tackle Russophobia head-on. Nobody sent me
here tonight.

I
will add one more reason for the traction of Russophobia. Distrust of
the media goes back a long way in Russia, to the early nineteenth
century – and with very good reason. The default attitude of
Russians, still today, is scepticism and cynicism. They may vote for
Putin because they like him or his policies, but this does not make
them trustful of what they read, and there is still a lot of
insecurity about the state of the country, about which they openly
complain. Despite the voter disaffection in this country, I think
that there is a far higher level of trust of what is said by The
Guardian, The Economist, The Sun, the BBC, amongst the British than
there is of equivalent channels in Russia. That is, one difference
between us and the Russians is that we are less sceptical of what we
are told.

Cuyu
bono? What are the most obvious motivations for fostering
Russophobia?

In
brief (and the substantive reasons really are brief): Russia’s
foreign policy does not follow that of the West. Western armaments
manufacturers have an interest in stoking a new Cold War, because the
War against Terror has not filled the gap in arms sales –
especially of nuclear weapons – left by the end of the Cold War.
And NATO desperately needs a raison d’être.

But
the interests of arms companies and NATO are not those of the West as
a whole. Russophobia acts in massively counter-productive ways. It
restricts its potentially enormous economic cooperation and cultural
and touristic interchange with Russia – one reason why
businesspeople have been opposed to the sanctions – and it pushes
Russia decisively towards economic, political, and military
cooperation with China and indeed the rest of the world. The
sanctions have had the effect of making Russia look at developing its
own version of VISA. It has welcomed the repatriation of Russian
wealth held abroad. And in the Ukraine, Western support for a coup
against an elected president has had the country on the brink of
civil war, and has increased the size of the territory of Russia. As
a friend of mine has repeatedly commented to me, ‘wars start when
politicians lie to journalists then believe what the read in the
press.’ Putin’s popularity is at a high of 83% in the wake of the
events in the Ukraine, and feeling against the US and EU on the part
of ordinary Russians is beginning to increase. This makes life harder
for Russians whose political agenda has support in the West. A good
example is gay rights activists, who have found their aims much
harder to achieve since a pro-gay attitude has effectually been
aligned with an anti-Russian one. Russian gay activists are now
arguably a more highly distrusted and isolated group than before they
received Western backing.

Also,
as is apparent to all Russians who are familiar with Russophobia,
Russia is being criticised for the wrong things – and this is its
most tragic irony. The country is far from perfect. Social security
is miserably low; there is bullying in the army and prisons, and
problems with racism, drugs, and domestic violence; health and
education are under-funded; income tax is flat. But these are not the
things for which Russia gets criticised, either by Westerners or
their own so-called liberal parties, which are obsessively concerned
with Putin himself.

The
people who are suffering in Russia are not liberal opposition leaders
with their abundant coverage in the Western press, but the poor.

And
who apart from the Communists, and to some extent Putin, is talking
about them?

Russophobia
is composed of ignorance, a failure of scepticism and reasoning,
pride, hypocrisy, condescension and churlishness, turned to the
service of the military-industrial complex and NATO. It supports a
one-sided Cold War against a country which is only just getting on
its feet after collapse, is primarily focused on improving the living
conditions of its people, wants war nowhere, and has no desire to be
our enemy unless forced to defend itself. I wish it well.